No, nothing like that.Students and alumni were, instead, turning
their ire on the
new logo for the entire university system that was recently unveiled.Facebook exploded, my union took up the cause
(to be fair they also talk about fees and contracts), and someone posted a
petition at Change.org which has since garnered over 50,000 signatures.To put that in perspective, I remember
signing petitions about fees, disinvestment, and police violence which were
lucky to get 5,000 signatures.

Now don’t get me wrong.The new logo is most charitably characterised
as a monstrosity.I’ve heard it
described variously as something anyone with a modicum of design skills could
whip up in 10 minutes (without the benefit of a focus group and a budget), as
what passed for fine art or graphic design in pre-school, as a toilet bowl, and
as the ‘C’ doing something unmentionable to the ‘U’.

The administration, exhibiting its
uncanny knack for being desperately out of touch with its students, explained
that the logo change was about making the university look more modern, up with
the times as it were.In reality of
course, it just looks goofy.Researchers
at the University of California are world class, but the only thing UCOP does
of that calibre is excuse-mongering, and their PR machine launched into
overdrive as
they explained their swift climb-down.

Some took heart from the unified front
that UC students and alumni presented to the administration, but I actually
found the whole episode a little sad and disconcerting.

It’s troubling, after all, that people
are willing to put their name to a petition rejecting a logo, but can find
neither the time nor the courage to object to terrible fee hikes and the
introduction of the sorry logic of the “free market” into our university.People complained that the logo didn’t
reflect the values and character of the University of California, but they
haven’t been willing to stand up for that wonderful institution which is our
home and was once the pride of our state.

Many students and alumni, to judge by
their actions, find the mutilation of the system’s logo more offensive than
they do the demand that they pay twice the fees that they did less than a
decade ago.They find the design flaws
in a symbolic representation of the University of California more objectionable
than they do the disfiguring of the University’s mission and public
character.

Because the real tragedy has been that successive
generations of Californians have been willing to put their short-term personal prosperity
ahead of long-term communal well-being.It is that we have created a system of government that allows one
generation to wage war on another, to create a set of conditions skewed to
benefit those who are wealthy and secure at the expense of those who struggle
and face daily uncertainty.It is tragic
that our Governor has been allowed to present decades of disinvestment and austerity
regimes as a “victory” for higher education.It is reprehensible that our community lets him and our representatives
get away with pushing this myth as inexorably as the UC Regents and the state’s
business community are pushing their grubby little market ideology, which they
pass off as a philosophy compatible with UC’s commitment to the promotion of social
and economic equality and justice.

Even Berkeley’s campus seems
increasingly quiescent in the face of what we are told is the overwhelming
logic of market diktats.Students are
too caught up in the rush of the semester and the hurry to get a marketable
degree to pause and think about how their educational experience is being
reconstructed, and how access to that experience will be circumscribed for
future generations of Californians.

We can hardly expect the state to invest
in our institution if we aren’t even willing to come to its defence.Unless the UC community regains some sense of
proportion and prepares to invest some time and energy in trying to roll back
the regressive measures of the past years, we’ll be left with a very nice logo
in a shell of a gutted institution, wondering how we allowed a public right to
be turned into a private commodity.We’ll
have to explain to ourselves and those who come after why we permitted a place
dedicated to the promotion of learning and the construction of citizenship into
a mercenary marketplace serving those citizens who can afford it and catering
to the short-term desires of the state’s corporate community rather than respecting
the long-term interests of the public.

There is no explanation for such a
transformation that would do credit to the generations which inhabit California
today.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

A few of my readers over at the Record Searchlight complain that I’m
overly slow in getting to the point.Fair warning...this will likely be no exception.

A common image of pre-Great War England
is of an assured, genteel, perhaps even pastoral land, its inhabitants enjoying
a complacency which would be shortly annihilated by the guns of August.But George Dangerfield’s classic The Strange Death of Liberal England shatters
the idea of a green, pleasant, and amicable land.His audaciously literary account (first
published in 1935), in explaining the breakdown of the consensus around liberal
society, portrays a very different country.

By 1910, Britain’s was a system buckling
under too many contradictions: it was a “free trade nation”, but that free
trade was based on gunboat diplomacy (the “freeing up” of trade), and was being
sharply questioned as Britain lost its comparative advantage and protectionists
gained in strength; Britain was meant to be a country of liberty, the
destination for refugees and revolutionaries fleeing autocratic Europe, but it
governed an enormous Empire through the use of force and violence; it was
committed to a laissez-faire
political and moral economy, and yet the working class was making demands that
led to the first hints of a welfare state while an emerging cadre of social
scientists and bourgeois philanthropists “discovered” poverty and other ills
brought on by industrialisation, urbanisation, and imperialism; Britons were
free, the Irish were not; more and more men were able to vote and participate
in civic life, women were largely not.

These contradictions reached the
breaking point, and by 1910, Britain was a society on the verge of war with
itself.A prehistoric Conservative Party
was fighting a rearguard action against democratic reform, and the Liberal
Party’s government of the day found itself in a tense standoff with the House
of Lords.Labour grew restive over the failure
of employers to pass on the benefits of good economic times to workers, who
were increasingly unwilling to be placated by vague promises.Ireland edged toward a civil war, and as the
government sought to deal with the vexed question of the northern provinces,
murmurs of mutiny wafted through the ranks.

In no place were the contradictions of
British society more evident than in what was surely one of the most dramatic
civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, in which the women of Britain demanded
the vote.It is salutary to recollect
that the struggle for suffrage was precisely that—a full-blown battle which
involved breaking windows, lighting fires, undertaking hunger strikes, and
generally ransacking what proved to be the hollow conscience of a supposedly
liberal nation.For after being
confronted by patronising tones and legal obstacles, .blank stares and laughs,
dissatisfied with the efforts of their more respectful sisters, who were
perpetually betrayed by both major parties, militant suffragettes turned to
civil disobedience.

Suffragettes did not shrink from
speaking the language of war in support of their cause, one which seems
absurdly obvious today, but which was answered at the time by
brutal force, terrible
imagery, and draconian legislation (most famously the “Cat and Mouse” Act)
aimed at squashing their efforts.“I am
here as a soldier”, Emmeline
Pankhurst declared to North American suffragettes in Connecticut in 1913,
“who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain—it seems
strange that it should have to be explained—what civil war is like when civil
war is waged by women”.Intimating that
in this final struggle for their rights women would not be intimidated, and
were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, Pankhurst opined, “Not by the
forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman.You can kill that woman, but she escapes you
then; you cannot govern here.And that
is, I think, a most valuable demonstration we have been making to the
world.We have been proving in our own
person that government does not rest upon force; it rests upon consent; as long
as people consent to government, it is perfectly easy to govern, but directly
they refuse then no power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who
withholds his or her consent”.Pankhurst
described the fury women felt when “we found that all the fine phrases about
freedom and liberty were entirely for male consumption and that they did not in
any way apply to women”.

The civil war was averted by the coming
of the Great War.That war passed,
leaving a momentarily changed country.Women (initially those under the age of thirty) won the vote, though
this was presented as a reward for “good behaviour” during the war.The House of Lords faded into irrelevance,
the flower of the English nobility having gone down with all the quaint notions
about the glory of war and battle in the trenches.Irish nationalists drove the British out, and
then fought a bloody civil war, echoes of which were felt last week as police disarmed
bombs in advance of the visit of a U.S. cabinet official.And the Trade Unions embarked on further
battles with successive governments.Baldwin turned the tables on them, portraying them as a rabble against
which the “constitutional classes” should arm itself, although in the end, the
welfare state which emerged in the post-Second World War era was a testament to
their struggle.

-----

It is in that pre-war world that Connie
Callaway and Will Maitland, the two characters at the heart of Anthony Quinn’s
novel, Half of the Human Race, find
themselves.They are not just
star-crossed lovers, but star-crossed members of a conflicted society.Initially drawn together by a shared love of
cricket, Connie and Will are kept at a distance in spite of their love by the
demands of the cold and respectable society they share.

In her Hartford speech, Pankhurst
declared that “in the course of our desperate struggle, we have had to make a
great many people uncomfortable”.It is
precisely this discomfort which lies at the heart of Quinn’s moving characters’
divide.For Connie is a committed if
also conflicted suffragist, and her passion by turns disturbs and attracts
Will, who ultimately feels humiliated by Connie’s embrace of militancy and her
subsequent imprisonment.Unmoved by the nudging
and urgings of those in his circle who see the depth of his affections for
Connie, Will persists in seeing himself as the victim, and the two characters
proceed, like ferries in the night, to pass each other again and again and
again, maddeningly unable to see the sentiments behind one another’s
actions.

So theirs is a love story, and a
well-written one.I found it easy to plunge
into the book, and once there, could hardly get out.The characters, a bit stiff in their Edwardian
way, were nonetheless affecting, and I found the novel as a whole to be almost
disturbingly moving.

But there is something more than a love
story there.Amidst the jocularity, the
cricket matches, the house parties, the weddings, the innumerable social
engagements and obligations of this affluent English society, there is the
story of impossible loneliness.It is a
story about the inability of people who love one another to communicate that
love openly and honestly.It is about the
failure of social chatter and small-talk to substitute for a conversation
between equals.It is about the cry for
help that never emerges from the mouth of a friend or loved one in need out of
fear of social sanction, and the haunted mien of those who let the un-uttered
cry go un-answered to avoid censure.It
is about a kind of familial and social authoritarianism—whether in the form of
Will’s daunting mother or the cricketing code—that grinds people down when it
does not kill them outright.It is about
the absurdity of the loyalty embodied by the men who charged “over the top”
into machine gun nests on Flanders field in the service of king and country and
empire, and yet who were unable to respect the cause embraced by their mothers
and sisters and wives.

The beautiful thing about Half of the Human Race is that it is
simultaneously a portrait and a narrative of a particular era and the outrages that people visited upon one another during that era, and a meditation
on moral frailty, social mores, love, and friendship.It is, in other words, very much worth
reading, and the best book I’ve read this year.

When its critics looked to define
everything they saw as wrong with the Bush Administration, they frequently
turned to the so-called “Torture Memos”.Penned by John Yoo, now unaccountably a Law professor at UC Berkeley,
these memos represented a calculated effort to take advantage of a crisis
situation to re-interpret executive power and privilege.Needless to say, that reinterpretation tended
towards a dramatic expansion and abuse of that power.Specifically, Yoo played a crude game,
redefining torture and narrowing the application of legal protections as they
obtained to those who found themselves in conflict with the United States,
whether through their actions or through being caught up in the often-indiscriminate
dragnet constructed by our military and intelligence services as we invaded
first Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Conyers: “I didn’t ask you if you ever
gave him advice, I asked you do you think the President could order a suspect
buried alive?”

Yoo: “Mr Chairman, my view right now, is
I don’t think that a President would—no American President would ever have to
order that or feel it necessary to order that”.

Conyers: “I think we understand the games
that are being played”.

Indeed.Citizens of what is ostensibly a democracy of some sort are being asked
to accept the notion that in moments of “emergency” (and this is an emergency
which has dragged on for eleven sorry years, and shows no sign of abating, as
President Obama expands the war with greater vigour—if less outright enthusiasm
and an equal lack of forethought—than his predecessor to “fronts” all around
the world), rights go out the window.In
an “emergency”, be it a moment like 9/11 or the “forever war” declared in the
following months, we are required to debase ourselves as a people, trample on
the very same rights we trumpet as we go to war, and engage in the most heinous
of acts against our so-called enemies.

We are asked, in effect, to accept as a
measure of good faith that our national security apparatus—an apparatus which has
practised torture, murder, assassination, the surveillance of American
citizens, the manufacture of evidence for multiple wars—would not misuse these
powers which they don’t even bother to ask that they be granted, but instead cook
up in back rooms with the aid of their lawyers.It’s as if a known and convicted murderer came to you and asked that you
allow him access to deadly weapons, promising that he or she would not use
them.It’s like a financial industry
causing an economic crisis and then asking that you relax the regulations on
them.Or like an energy industry taking
advantage of poor oversight and then, through carelessness, causing an
environmental and social disaster, and then coming to ask you to weaken said
regulations further.

Upon being elected, the President
repeatedly reiterated that his administration would be “the most open and
transparent in history”.He even issued
a Memorandum
for the Heads of Executive Departments
and agencies on the subject of “Transparency and Open Government”, reiterating
his commitment to “creating an unprecedented level of openness in
Government.We will work together”, it
went on to read, “to ensure the public trust and establish a system of
transparency, public participation, and collaboration.Openness will strengthen our democracy and
promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government”.

The administration’s logic, according
to those who saw Obama’s Murder Memo,
threw these supposedly sacred laws under one bus after another, relentlessly
mowing down legal protections on the basis that in wartime, anything, anywhere
goes.

This, at least, is the general
thrust.We cannot know precisely what
the Murder Memo authorises, because the President has chosen to hide the
rationale behind his frightful violence from the public.If the rights to which the President pays an
increasingly-hypocritical lip service in virtually every public utterance are really
so important, surely he could at least dignify the public—the public which
elected him—with an explanation of why he sees the need to take the law into
his own hand and give himself the power to kill American citizens without
defending a change in the law before Congress.

Perhaps the President could even dignify
us with an explanation of his more comprehensive thinking about national
security.If he is prepared to act on
the idea that national security trumps public rights, surely that is a fitting
topic for a national address.If he is
prepared to argue that the killing of people, the destruction of
infrastructure, the assassination of individuals, and the overthrow of
governments by using armed drones is not war, thereby evading Congressional oversight,
then perhaps he could say this publicly to the nation.If he is prepared to endorse a system in
which a whistleblower is tortured on a brig and kept away from his lawyers for
months, but CIA personnel who murdered prisoners in their custody walk free,
perhaps he could include a reference to this in his State of the Union
Address.If he is prepared to persecute
wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and contemplate expanding his War of
Terror to Mali, perhaps his pollsters—who drive so much of Presidents’ thinking
these days—could at least ask people what they think about their country going
to war on a permanent basis against an ephemeral enemy in a manner calculated
to imperil the public interest.

We have been at war on a
steadily-expanding number of fronts for increasingly-opaque purposes since
9/11.In waging these wars, we have
effectively entered a kind of tunnel as one country, and will emerge as an
altogether different one.We have
performed wicked deeds, and condoned unspeakable acts.Because they continue to take place in the
dark, we can’t quite tell what they were, and I doubt that we shall ever know
the full extent of the killing that’s been done in these wars.The prisons, torture chambers, rendition
flights, dirty deals, weapons sales, kidnappings, and murders will never be
fully documented.But the story of our
descent into this pit will be more complete if we demand that our elected
leaders explain the basis on which we are making these decisions.But I suspect that the President knows that
his moral contortions would prove too much for the public, and that he would
risk severe censure if his machinations ever became transparent.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

“Greetings, visitors from outer
space!You have arrived in a place
called California.The weather is nice,
the scenery is pleasing to the eye.But
we are short on cash, divided by our politics, and sensitive to impingements on
the public purse.So behave accordingly!”So should read the sign greeting the UC
Regents outside of their monthly meetings, and the new UC Berkeley Chancellor,
Nicholas Dirks.

I have no idea where the UC Regents
live.I suspect that they’re scattered
around the urban centres of the state, and convene for periodic meetings to
decide on matters of great importance for the future of the state’s, the nation’s,
and the globe’s preeminent system of public higher education.But when I read about some of their decisions
and hear some of their convoluted logic, I can’t help but wonder whether
they’re actually beamed down from a space-ship for each of these meetings.They appear so insulated from reality, so
unaware of the world in which they live, that I have to question their ability
to do their job.

Their latest move has been to approve
a $50,000 pay raise for Berkeley’s incoming chancellor, Nicholas Dirks.This move comes during a decade when the
campus, the system, and students have been feeling an increasingly
uncomfortable pinch.The fact that
student fees and administrative pay have been rising in concert says very
little that is comforting to students.It is, however, very clarifying with regard to the thinking of the
Regents and the cadre of administrators which is throwing its weight around the
halls of our campuses.

Put things in perspective.The Regents, UCOP and many UC students,
together with their Cal State counterparts and Democrats around the state just
finished making a passionate case to voters that they needed to dig deeper into
their pockets to fund their prized academic institutions.This was necessary to offset cuts which would
otherwise be coming our way, cuts which would force up the tuition of students
and damage academic divisions.The voters
acquiesced to higher taxes (albeit on a handful of their members), something
unusual in California.And now money is
being spent on a $50,000 raise for an administrator.

The image this creates—of the Regents,
Chancellors, and UCOP breaking out the champagne after averting devastating
cuts to the university, and rewarding themselves rather than those members of
our community who are bearing the burden of state disinvestment—is unhelpful to
put it mildly.Students, after all, are
paying the same unconscionably high levels of tuition today that they were
before the passage of Prop 30.Our Governor
is still talking about the need for belt-tightening and austerity.These people are, in other words, the Mitt
Romneys of the higher education world--they're out of touch and they couldn't care less.

As it is, the actions of the UC Regents
are giving cover to business-minded critics of the university who would like to
see it drop its commitment to building citizenship and fostering critical
thinking amongst a large number of the state’s students (with the support of
the public) in favour of a for-profit model which turns out employees to staff
those industries which the business-community, its eye fixed firmly on a
short-term horizon, deems essential. (Another big problem, stemming from the corrupt if perfectly legal method of the appointment of Regents, is that they often are the business-minded critics, and so operate at UC either in spite of or because of considerable conflict of moral interest.)

We hear, again and again, the argument
about the need for effective administrators.But I would like to know exactly what it is we are paying for when we
give someone occupying the office of Chancellor, an office which already comes
with money that looks pretty darn good to most of us, a raise.It’s not campus leadership.It’s not efficacy in advocacy.It’s certainly not progressive thinking about
the changing nature of the university.

The rhetoric of the 1% versus the 99%
may be inadequate to fully describe the relations between different sectors of
the increasingly-divided campus community.But it is certainly not inaccurate.Operation Excellence, the exaltation of “high powered” administrators, the
insistence that Berkeley deserves “only the best” of the campus-corporate types
to sit in California Hall...these things offer very little that is concrete to
the university in technical terms, and exactly nothing whatsoever in terms of
values and culture.

Many of us have sought for some years
now to argue that the real blame lies with Sacramento, a dysfunctional
political structure, and a party comprised of zealots and economic fundamentalists,
rather than with campus leadership.But that
is a difficult and ever-more unsustainable argument to maintain when our campus
and system representatives to Sacramento are letting us down so badly, when our
leadership looks like a part of the predatory class behind our ills rather than
an opposition to it, and when that same leadership—again at the system and
campus level—is so offensively tone deaf to the pain which students are feeling
and to the straits in which the state finds itself.

It is not often that I’d find myself in
agreement with Governor Brown, but he was right to say that Dirks’ raise “does
not fit within the spirit of servant leadership that I think will be required
over the next few years”. If they
are smart, the Regents should reconsider their suggestion, Dirks should make
clear that he does not want or need this raise, and the administrative
leadershipof the University of
California should start behaving like a public body primarily concerned with
the welfare of its students and academics—the people who do the real work on
our campuses.

Otherwise, they shouldn’t be surprised
when they face a restive campus.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.